By Steve Rhodes

I’m only sorry I didn’t think of it yesterday (and Major League Baseball would probably never allow it), but the perfect new Cubs owner just might be . . . Mike Veeck.
Bring back the magic, Mike.
Obamafile
“A close examination of Obama’s first campaign clouds the image he has cultivated throughout his political career: The man now running for president on a message of giving a voice to the voiceless first entered public office not by leveling the playing field, but by clearing it,” the Tribune reports in the latest of its fine (and finally arrived) series on Obama.
The story the Tribune tells today is one well-known within political circles: How he knocked his one-time sponsor, former state Sen. Alice Palmer, out of the Democratic primary that put him in the statehouse.
While a case could be made that Palmer dug her own grave, the Tribune shows that Obama also knocked two other candidates off the ballot in that race – clearing the field – in part on the kind of technicalities (and in part wholly legitimately) that have made ballot access a significant issue here and nationwide. After Obama’s challenges, one candidate came up 86 names short on his nominating petitions, while another came up 69 names short. Obama’s challenges were successful in part because of a purge at the time of nearly 16,000 “unqualified names” from the voter rolls.

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Posted on April 4, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

The sale of the 150-odd year Tribune Company to Sam Zell is seismic, given the company’s historic significance and influence in the city, as well as its national footprint with media properties within reach of something like 80 percent of all Americans. The ramifications are, as they say, vast for democracy and civic life here and elsewhere. Sam Zell just became a very important man in the nation’s mediascape.
But first a few words about the Cubs.

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Posted on April 3, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

BREAKING 11 A.M.: CLINE RESIGNS.
1. BREAKING: The Tribune Company has announced it will sell the Cubs after this season. Curse included.
2. The news follows the announcement that Sam Zell has bought the Tribune Company and will return it to private ownership.
3. “Even some industry rivals are dumbfounded by what Zell has planned,” the Tribune reported in its print editions this morning.
“The amount of debt Tribune is going to have blows my mind,” one of them told the paper. “It seems very dangerous to me.”

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Posted on April 2, 2007

By The Weekend Desk B Team

Natasha Julius is holed up in a mountain retreat reading Alberto Gonzales’ e-mails and has left us minions on the Weekend Desk in charge. Our immediate focus is the Final Four. We’re in seventh-place in the Beachwood Inn‘s pool, but believe we win it all if UCLA beats Georgetown in the championship.
The Weekend Desk is also keeping an eye on last-minute news out of spring training. Check out the first installment of The Cubs Factor for a look at what will go wrong for the North Siders this season. (We hope to begin a similar Sox feature this week.)
We’re also keeping an eye on who will be forced to resign first: Gonzales or Chicago police chief Phil Cline. If only it could be Frank Kruesi. (“CTA ‘Hell’ To Begin Monday“)

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Posted on March 31, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

God, this sounds funny.
Sun-Times columnist Cathleen Falsani writes this morning about a YouTube series called God, Inc., made by a Park Ridge native.
“The basic premise of God, Inc. is that the bulk of what’s going wrong on Earth is the fault of corporate mismanagement and worker malaise in God’s office, i.e., heaven,” Falsani writes.
“There’s only one guy left in the miracles department; tsunamis, earthquakes and other ‘acts of God’ are handled by the massive ‘Disasters’ department, and three geeks in the windowless room of the ‘Product Development’ department are in charge of dreaming up new plant and animal species.
“That’s where sweet Sarah, the focal protagonist, has been placed as an intern upon her untimely death from leukemia. Her first successful foray into the creation racket is a rainbow-colored frog, drawing the wrath of her colleague Gavin, who can’t seem to get his porcupottamus design approved.

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Posted on March 30, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

Barack Obama “invited” CNN’s Wolf Blitzer into his Senate office on Wednesday for an “exclusive” interview that proved unsatisfying – but revealing – on both ends.
* Blitzer showed a video of Obama speaking before the New Trier Democratic Organization in 2003 saying he would vote against an $87 billion Iraq war funding bill. As Blitzer noted, Obama actually ended up voting for it.
Obama’s explanation? His particular concern about the bill was $20 billion in no-bid reconstruction contracts. But the video clearly showed Obama thundering that Congress should say “no to George Bush.”

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Posted on March 29, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

Chicago police chief Phil Cline says he is “sickened and embarrassed” about the Anthony Abbate incident, but it’s not at all clear that he recognizes or is willing to acknowledge the depth of the problem with the department’s throwback culture.
It’s not clear either that the oldstream media has a firm grip.
While the Tribune has done fantastic work in recent years on the death penalty, prosecutorial misconduct, and other failings of the criminal justice system, it was John Conroy at the Reader who did Pulitzer-worthy work laying out the horrific tale of torture that occurred under Jon Burge that still festers – and that the mayor still refuses to speak honestly about.
More recently, Jamie Kalven has been documenting the incredible rarity of Chicago police officers actually being disciplined for their abuses.
It’s of a piece. Chicago’s version of community policing is a sham. The mayor refuses – for reasons that can only be interpreted as racist and political – to sanction beat redeployment to actually put the most cops where the most crime occurs. His alternate solution to a murder rate that became the nation’s worst among big cities on his watch was to create an elite tactical unit that has, predictably, turned out to be a problem in and of itself.

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Posted on March 28, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

1. I have seen the best neighborhoods of my generation destroyed.
2. The 13 Most Overlooked Tax Deductions.
3. The Chicago band OK Go has won You Tube’s most creative video award and indeed the treadmill choreography is pretty incredible.

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Posted on March 27, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

1. The Tribune‘s editorial board finally took the leap this weekend and called for the abolition of the death penalty.
2. “I’ve been riding the El pretty much all my life, and I’ve never seen performance anywhere this bad,” Alexander Facklis, a 37-year-old Blue Line rider, tells The New York Times.
The Times notes this morning that “The El’s slower trains prevent it from carrying as many passengers per hour as transit systems in Atlanta, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and the San Francisco Bay area, according to a state performance audit released this month.”
3. As tends to be the case, the off-duty Chicago cop who made national news by beating up a tiny female bartender as a video camera rolled has a history.
“[Anthony Abbate] was one of 100 Chicago police officers who had been hired despite having prior drug or alcohol related driving offenses,” Channel 2’s Dave Savini reports. “Abbate had also been arrested for drag racing and driving on a suspended license.”
Savini, it turns out, interviewed Abbate five years ago. Abbate said then “he was sorry for his prior drunk driving and would never do anything like that again,” Savini reports. “He was also named in a civil rights suit back then. That plaintiff is deceased.”
The Chicago police brass are moving to fire Abbate, Savini notes. But the department’s inability – or unwillingness – to weed out cops with a pattern of misbehavior is a longstanding issue that won’t go away by getting rid of one guy.

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Posted on March 26, 2007

By Natasha Julius

The stories we’re tracking this weekend so you don’t have to.
Market Update
Governmental Transparency slumped to record lows this week as the smart money flooded into Craven Bipartisanship. Meanwhile, it appears despite widespread market volatility, Brownie is still doing a heck of a job.

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Posted on March 24, 2007